UPDATE 17 March 2013: I am placing this post into the public domain
so people are free to incorporate it into their existing files which may
be in the public domain already.

As I commented in my last post about tmux, tmux mouse mode left
some things to be desired. Namely, there are two problems.

First, it completely takes over the mouse. Meaning that you can no longer do a
simple “mark text and copy” operation on the native OS. There are patches over
this problem, like reattach-to-user-namespace, but that is only
helpful if you are running tmux on your Mac. I practically never do that,
because most of the usefulness of tmux for me is in leaving active sessions to
remote servers. I work on remote servers over ssh connections, detach from
tmux, and stick my laptop in its bag. I come back to the session later. That
would not be possible if tmux were running on my Mac, so I am almost always
running it remotely on a Linux server.

Second, there is the pane problem. If you turn mouse mode off, and try to copy
text in a pane that has another pane to its side, the terminal will just copy
across the boundary. iTerm has no idea that the pane boundary exists; it’s just
another character printed in the terminal window.

These days, I have mouse mode turned on by default in .tmux.conf. It’s just
too useful to not have it on. If my hand is already on the trackpad, switching
between windows or panes, or doing pane resizes, is very handy with the
pointer. It’s also usually much faster to do a mark/copy operation within tmux
by using the pointer.

1234

set -g mode-mouse on
set -g mouse-resize-pane on
set -g mouse-select-pane on
set -g mouse-select-window on

But I do often want to do an OS-native mark and copy. So, I have defined two
hotkeys to make it easy to turn mouse mode on and off.

123456789101112131415

# Toggle mouse on with ^B m
bind m \
set -g mode-mouse on \;\
set -g mouse-resize-pane on \;\
set -g mouse-select-pane on \;\
set -g mouse-select-window on \;\
display 'Mouse: ON'
# Toggle mouse off with ^B M
bind M \
set -g mode-mouse off \;\
set -g mouse-resize-pane off \;\
set -g mouse-select-pane off \;\
set -g mouse-select-window off \;\
display 'Mouse: OFF'

UPDATE 20 July 2012: @aristidesfl points out that you don’t
need to bind anything for mouse mode disable in iTerm2, simply hold option
down and iTerm2 turns it off temporarily.

That makes it easy to switch between the two states (mouse mode on or off). But
there is still one nagging situation: I want to do OS-native copy and paste,
but it’s in a pane. Even with mouse mode off, things break because the terminal
does not know what a tmux pane is. Once again, key bindings come to the rescue.

These bindings (^B + and ^B -) are a “zoom” feature. Focused on a given
pane, ^B + will promote the pane to be its own window. Then you can do
OS-native mark and copy all you want, no panes to worry about. When you’re
done, just use ^B - to turn the window back into a pane, right where it was
before.

I’ve chosen to keep these two things separate, but with a little tinkering,
you can create a binding that does both operations together: zoom a window,
turn mouse mode off, and another binding to do the inverse.

UPDATE 17 March 2013: I am placing this post into the public domain
so people are free to incorporate it into their existing files which may
be in the public domain already.

UPDATE 16 July 2012: I have updated this post to reflect my current
keymaps, which I settled on after writing the original post.

As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of iTerm2. I am also
a huge fan of tmux, the terminal multiplexor. If you’re not familiar with
tmux, it’s conceptually the same thing as GNU screen, with some
differences, and (in my opinion) some advantages. For example:

In screen, each instance is its own completely separate process. With
tmux, the first time you run it, you start a server, but subsequent runs
will instantiate clients that connect to that existing server. Why does
that matter? Because it means you can lop a window off of one tmux
session and glue it onto another. It also means you can view the same
session from multiple clients simultaneously (say you left tmux attached
at the office, you can attach to that same session at home without
disrupting the session you left attached at work). You can even
share a session with someone else. All of that’s
possible because it’s all going on in the same server process.

tmux supports multiple panes within a window, where screen supports only
windows.

If you don’t set a window title, tmux will auto-set it for you based
on what you run in that window. So it might start as “bash” and change
automatically to “vim” or “top” or “tail” depending on what you run
inside. That is pretty handy to tell what’s going on in what window
even if you don’t take the time to set a name for it.

It so happens that the authors of iTerm2 are tmux users as well, and they have
integrated a tmux mode into iTerm2. It’s an early stage thing, so you have to
forgive it, but at this point it still has some drawbacks. I am not going to
talk about that integration much in this post, but I wanted to point out that
it exists, that I know about it, and explain why I don’t use it.

You can only connect iTerm2 to one iTerm2-aware tmux session at a time.

They communicate via a special protocol. In practical terms, this means
you “spend” a window for that channel. It sort of sits around lingering.
To be fair, they added an option to auto-hide it on connect so it goes
away by itself.

Because this is still under development, you currently have to run
the right version of iTerm2 with the right version of patched tmux.
That can be a headache if your server side is used by multiple people.
It also means an upgrade to iTerm2 sends you off to recompile tmux
before you can use it in integrated mode again.

For these reasons, I have set aside the iTerm2 tmux integration and I’m
just using regular tmux again. I’ll check it out again someday after it has
matured (and preferably been built into tmux mainline so I don’t have to
patch a copy myself).

But after using the integration, I found I was longing for easy hotkeys to
navigate around my windows and panes in tmux. (Using the integrated mode, you
use the iTerm-native hotkeys because it treats the tmux windows and panes as
native iTerm tabs and panes).

I was frustrated by this because in tmux you use a prefix key for everything,
so going to the next window means using Ctrl-B n and going to another pane
might be Ctrl-B H. You can remap a lot of things, but it’s never as easy as
native keys like Shift-Cmd-Right or similar that we are used to using on
Macs and PCs.

At first, I played with the tmux mouse mode. It’s actually pretty nice.
Assuming you send mouse events through to the server, tmux will recognize them
(if you turn on the appropriate options), allowing you to select windows and
panes using mouse clicks. You can even resize panes. Unfortunately, that comes
at a cost: it breaks using normal mouse selection to copy from iTerm2 window
into other programs on your Mac. Not good.

Send Hex Code is just an unassuming option in a pulldown in the iTerm key
mapping preferences. But when I saw it, I knew it was the solution to my
problem. The thing is, you can represent any ASCII character as a hex value,
and sending a sequence of ASCII characters is exactly what I needed to do.

Armed with all of my hex sequences, I headed to the iTerm2 preferences. Under
the “Keys” section, you can add new items to the global shortcut list. (You
can also do this in a profile’s key settings if you have a reason to not want
bindings to be available to all profiles.) I added the below sequences,
binding them to hotkeys.

Now I can move between tmux windows with Ctrl-Cmd-{direction}, move among
panes with Cmd-{direction}, and resize with Cmd-Opt-{direction}. It’s
really nice, and I can use Vim keys (H,J,K,L) or arrows.

(Yes, I am aware that this overrides certain keymaps. You will lose the
“Hide” hotkey, Cmd-H, but I never use that so I didn’t care. iTerm also
maps Cmd-{left,right} to navigate between tabs, but Cmd-{digit} and
Shift-Cmd-{left,right} will still work.)

Lastly, a few finishing touches for my tmux.conf. The colors I use
here assume Solarized Dark for the iTerm color scheme. They may
look awful with another color scheme (or they may look fine).

A bit of history to give some perspective on our modern issue of piracy (music
and movies):

A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later.

Back then the issue was duplicating popular fabric patterns. Yes, that was
really a thing. And note that this didn’t happen to only a handful of
offenders. Sixteen thousand people suffered this fate. Over fabric patterns.

The brutality of our forebears never fails to amaze me.

But it’s the end result of this practice that I find the most fascinating:

Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.

Another HUGE complaint I’d like to add to Brad’s list is when these websites draw a story out over 10 pages.

Welcome to the Internet — a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”. There is absolutely NO REASON for any story to span over more than one single page.

I wholeheartedly agree.

But the problem here isn’t cluelessness on the part of the editors. The problem
is that newspapers aren’t in the business of providing news, and they never
have been. They are in the business of gathering page views. They used to call
it circulation, and they used to sell half-page ads, classifieds, and coupon
inserts, but it’s the same game as it ever was (except less profitable).

Back in the 90s, I toured a local NBC affiliate’s offices with a friend who was
in the news business. Two things I heard that day have informed my opinion of
commercial news ever since.

My friend, a local news producer for many years:

How we decide what’s on tonight’s news: News is whatever I say it is.

Down in the bowels of the building was a room where two men watched a wall of
monitors. A videotape robot busily swapped tapes behind them. This room aired
the commercials.

This is the only room in the whole building that matters. What you think of as TV is just the stuff we cram in between commercials to keep you from changing channels.

Now and then you hear an old-timer rant about how we young people never sit
down and write a real letter anymore. (Young in this case is probably defined
as under 75.) We’re too busy with our email, our Twitter and Facebook, our IMs
and texts.

Clearly, they are technically correct. Nobody writes letters anymore. It’s
archaic, a relic of a bygone era. It’s simple economics. In the old days,
a letter was the best option to reach across a great distance and communicate
with someone. Technology has changed the equation; many better options now
exist.

Think of the oldest person you know. Consider life when they came of age.
That’s when we set our expectations of how the world is supposed to work. I’ll
use my wife’s grandmother as an example. She will turn 91 in a few weeks,
meaning she was born in the spring of 1920, in rural Poland. Since then she has
seen a lot, including the inside of a Nazi work camp.

What was life like when she came of age? Well, she lived in the country. She
probably walked everywhere. Maybe she had a bike, maybe not. There was no
Internet. There were no mobile phones. The television would not be invented
until she was eight years old, but I suspect she did not personally see one
until she emigrated to the United States after World War II. A trip to the next
town over would probably have been a major undertaking, let alone a long trip
(even one to a country next door, a fairly short trip by modern first-world
standards).

I am not saying she rants about people not writing letters; I can’t say I have
ever heard her say anything on the subject. But within her life experience,
a letter was the best option for most of the time. Only after she was entering
her 70s were better options coming into play: cheap long-distance rates and the
Internet.

As I age, I find myself thinking about the longevity of the information
artifacts we generate. In the beginning, I was mostly worried about digital
photos. How could I ensure they survived? Unlike film negatives, digital
storage technology changes quickly. Think fast: here’s a ZIP disk. Can you read
it? No? What about this 5.25” floppy? 3.5”? What is the likelihood that the
JPEG format will be readable by computers in common use when I am
a grandparent?

These days, I am concerned about digital artifacts as a whole. My life is
ever-increasingly digital, as it is with all of us. I have scanned and shredded
most of my file cabinet. I get my bills via email. I communicate with everyone
online, leaving no persistent trail (or so I hope). I haven’t used a film
camera in years. My magnetic-tape videocamera is in a bag somewhere, but my
Flip Mino and my iPhone shoot video all the time.

For the past ten years, I have been a member of Distributed Proofreaders,
whose mission is to help Project Gutenberg digitize public domain works for
safekeeping and distribution. We scan old books using OCR software, and then
the hive mind goes to work. I and many others proofread scanned text. Others
take the output from proofreaders and add formatting markup (italics,
footnotes, etc.). After several rounds of work, a completed ebook is handed off
to Project Gutenberg for publication. It is, for me, important work that I am
happy to help with. Time will destroy all old books eventually; I believe they
should be preserved for future generations.

I am currently working on a biography about William Cowper, a writer and
poet who lived during the latter half of the 18th century. As with many such
books, it is full of correspondence, which tells the story of his life. You get
a feel for who he was, how he lived, how his relationships worked. I had never
heard of William Cowper before I began scrutinizing these scans for errors, but
I now find myself fascinated with his story.

I wonder: will anyone be able to write such books about us in a hundred years?
How would they go about it? There will be so little left behind. Will your blog
still be running for someone to analyze? Where will your emails be accessible?
Your tweets? God help you, your Facebook photos from college?

They say the Internet never forgets, but I’m not so sure. I suspect that over
a long enough period of time, the Internet will in fact forget. It will forget
us all.

Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.

In fact, worse than worthless, because once you’ve accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn’t retire to the town they preferred because they couldn’t afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn’t theirs; it’s their stuff’s.

Not long after I bought my first home in 1997, I was talking to the next-door
neighbor and mentioned that I was envious of his basement. My house didn’t have
one, but I had grown up with basements all my life. I was always trying to
figure out where to store things.

He replied that he had been in his house since it was built in the early 50s,
and he pitied whoever had to clean the basement out when he died. That was the
first time I ever thought of a basement as a double-edged sword.

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

This reminds me of the storage unit I rented when I was selling my last house.
I filled a 100 square foot room with extraneous stuff I didn’t have any
day-to-day use for. It sat in there for more than six months.

Unfortunately, Instapaper’s support for the Kindle is missing
one pretty big feature: the ability to assign a specific Instapaper folder to
send to a Kindle.

The only choice today is to feed “Read Later” to a Kindle. That’s great, if you
only use Instapaper for articles you want to read later. But how many people
actually use it that way?

I feed all sorts of things into Instapaper.

Longer-form articles

Short blog posts

YouTube or Vimeo video pages

A political petition to be filled out

A cool gadget I saw on Amazon or wherever

The long-form articles are what I want to send to my Kindle.

The blog posts would work for it, but why bother sending them there? I can
usually read those in under two minutes. And sending video pages or petitions
to my Kindle is just a waste. I can’t do anything with them there.

My solution for a while now has been to split “Read Later” into two folders.
The main “Read Later,” and a second that I named “Read Later - not for Kindle.”
I have two bookmarklets in Safari, one to send to my Kindle, the other to send
to a generic Instapaper folder. Not so bad, right?

Not if I’m using a browser.

Here’s the problem. I send things to Instapaper from a lot of places. The
browser, sure, but also from certain web apps I use, and from a number of
iPhone apps. Sometimes I email content to my Instapaper account. And none of
those methods support folders. The default for feeding into Instapaper via its
API or email is to stuff everything into “Read Later.”

That leaves me back where I started—now I have Kindle-inappropriate items
that might get fed to my Kindle. I have to pay Amazon for that delivery (okay,
it’s really cheap, but I’m still paying for it).

I have workarounds. Most iPhone apps, for instance, support opening links in
Mobile Safari. So I do that, leaving the app I was using, wait for the page to
load a second time in Safari, then use a bookmarklet to save to my non-Kindle
Instapaper folder. Then I have to go back to the app I started from, sometimes
having to wait for the page to load a third time, only to tap back to whatever
I am viewing (a Twitter stream, Facebook, Pulse News, whatever).

I could just put everything in “Read Later,” then go into the Instapaper iPhone
app or the web site and tidy up the folders before Friday morning when the
weekly Kindle deliveries go out. If I remember to. Which I never do.

All of this would be solved if Instapaper supported assigning a folder for
Kindle posts. Then I could haphazardly fill up “Read Later,” and as I look
through that stream, move things into the Kindle folder. Easy. Or at least much
easier than the dance I’ve been going through.

I mean was going through. Because at this point, I’m finding this dance so
annoying that I have turned Kindle deliveries off entirely. I’ll just read
things on my iPhone or laptop, and go back to using the Kindle for reading
books.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle and I love Instapaper. I’m just sick of
workarounds.

iTerm2 is a fork of the original iTerm project. By and large, they are
the same, but iTerm2 has a considerable number of improvements. Here are a few.

Smart cursor color

This may seem minor, but it’s nice to have. iTerm2 watches the colors being
displayed, and will adjust the cursor color to ensure it is fairly visible on
the screen.

Paste history

The last 20 items you copied from iTerm2, or pasted into it, are memorized. You
can access that list with a hotkey combo.

Even if you use a clipboard history manager, like the one built into
LaunchBar, this is useful because it is limited to the iTerm2 application.
You can copy and paste all you want in other parts of the system, and the last
20 items that dealt with iTerm2 are always waiting for you when you get back.

Find and autocomplete

The Find feature in iTerm2 is really nice. Cmd-F brings up a search bar at
the bottom of the window, similar to the one used in Safari. Enter your search
string. Hit Tab to select to the end of the word (or Shift-Tab to go to the
beginning of the word). You can find, select, and copy, all without needing to
touch a mouse or trackpad.

But even better is autocomplete. Start typing, then hit Cmd-; to bring up
an autocomplete list, built from the contents of the window as well as the
aforementioned paste history. Type some more to refine the selection list. Use
the Up and Down arrow keys to choose what you are after, then Enter to
insert it at the cursor position.

Instant replay

Last, but absolutely not least, is the most innovative feature I’ve seen in
a terminal emulator since… well, since ever. This is iTerm2’s “wow factor.”

Instant reply is TiVo for your terminal session.

No, I don’t mean you can scroll backward. Any terminal can do that. Instant
replay is like having someone stand over your shoulder with a videocamera,
recording your session. At any moment you can turn to them and ask for the tape
to be rewound and played back.

If that doesn’t sound useful to you, you aren’t thinking hard enough.

How many times have you lost output because something like vim or less
render in a way that doesn’t appear in your scrollback buffer? What about
curses-driven interfaces, which vanish forever when they close? Even when
they’re still running, the screens change and you can lose what you were
looking at before. Instant reply captures all of it. You can scrub back and
forth in time, just like when you play a video file.

It even remembers when you resized the window, and resizes it appropriately as
you step back and forth in time.